Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
Minna M. Koskela,Arto Annila +1 more
TL;DR: Genomic sequences across diverse species seem to align towards a common ancestry, eventually implying that eons ago some universal antecedent organism would have lived on the face of Earth, but when evolution is understood not only as a biological process but as a general thermodynamic process, it becomes apparent that the quest for the last universal common ancestor is unattainable.
read more
Abstract: Genomic sequences across diverse species seem to align towards a common ancestry, eventually implying that eons ago some universal antecedent organism would have lived on the face of Earth. However, when evolution is understood not only as a biological process but as a general thermodynamic process, it becomes apparent that the quest for the last universal common ancestor is unattainable. Ambiguities in alignments are unavoidable because the driving forces and paths of evolution cannot be separated from each other. Thus tracking down life’s origin is by its nature a non-computable task. The thermodynamic tenet clarifies that evolution is a path-dependent process of least-time consumption of free energy. The natural process is without a demarcation line between animate and inanimate.
read more
Chat with Paper
AI Agents for this Paper
Find similar papers on Google Scholar, PubMed and Arxiv
Write a critical review of this paper
Analyze citations of this paper to find unaddressed research gaps
Citations
Primary Endosymbiosis: Emergence of the Primary Chloroplast and the Chromatophore, Two Independent Events.
TL;DR: This chapter describes the current understanding of primary endosymbiosis, with a specific focus on primary chloroplasts considered to have emerged more than one billion years ago, and on the chromatophore, having emerged about one hundred million years ago.
24
How Did Thylakoids Emerge in Cyanobacteria, and How Were the Primary Chloroplast and Chromatophore Acquired?
Eric Maréchal
TL;DR: Thylakoids in cyanobacteria emerged from a lipid phase transition, coinciding with the great oxygenation event, while primary chloroplasts and chromatophores acquired through primary endosymbiosis, facilitated by horizontal gene transfers and phagocytic membranes.
2
A History of Genomic Structures: The Big Picture
Nicolas Carels
- 01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: A comprehensive compilation of genomic structure evolution that should help the reader who is not familiar with genomics to understand the mechanisms that are shaping its structures over time and gives a constructive view of the life journey to the reader.
2
References
A few logs suffice to build (almost) all trees: part II
TL;DR: Another tree reconstruction method, the witness-antiwitness method (WAM), is presented, which is faster than DCM, especially on random trees, and converges to the true tree topology at the same rate as DCM.
Causes and evolutionary significance of genetic convergence
TL;DR: Approaches for gaining further insights into the causes of genetic convergence and their potential contribution to the authors' understanding of how the genetic background determines the evolvability of complex organismal traits are discussed.
The scientific papers
TL;DR: Physical and psychosocial factors associated with psychostimulant use in a nationally representative sample of French adolescents: Specificities of cocaine, amphetamine, and ecstasy use are studied.
•Book
Evolving Hierarchical Systems: Their Structure and Representation
Stanley N. Salthe
- 21 Oct 1985
TL;DR: In this paper, Hierarchical Structure and Representation of the World (HSS) is presented as a hierarchy of the individual entity in a dynamic system hierarchically, and the Nontransivity of effects across levels.
Natural games
Jani Anttila,Arto Annila +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the behavior in the context of game theory is described as a natural process that follows the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the rate of entropy increase as the payoff function is derived from statistical physics of open systems.